Ideas That Changed My Life
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Ideas That Changed My Life
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Re: Ideas That Changed My Life
#2We would all benefit from remembering this one
> 23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Re: Ideas That Changed My Life
#3> 24. Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
"Complexity is a subsidy."--Jonah Goldberg
Re: Ideas That Changed My Life
#4Another good idea that will change your life is to keep things short and simple. 51 ideas is like 43 too many :)
Re: Ideas That Changed My Life
#5We would all benefit from remembering this one > 23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Indeed! Gall's SYSTEMANTICS [1] is worth a read in its entirety.
Re: Ideas That Changed My Life
#6We would all benefit from remembering this one > 23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Let me present the Paige Compositor. A typesetting machine if you like, made from 18,000 precision made parts in 1877. Well, 1877 is the start year of the contract. The project went on for about 15 years. 6 machines were ever made (out of 4,000 ordered). They kept failing.
Meanwhile, a much more limited (initially) machine arrived on the scene, the Linotype machine. It was successfull and did run the world's news and magazine press for the next 100 years.
It's really a fascinating read: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2023/03/the-machine...
Re: Ideas That Changed My Life
#7hmm, starting with these two so high in the list makes it difficult to properly read the rest.
> 2. Doublespeak: People often say the opposite of what they mean
> 4. Preference Falsification: People lie about their true opinions
Are we supposed to apply these to the 48 other ideas that he pitches as his guiding lights ?
Otherwise I think more than the ideas themselves, it's a good reminder that anyone having seen enough paradigms will have a prism of often contradicting ideas to look through any specific issue. None of these ideas would make sense on their own, nor has much value outside of being another perspective to complete the others.
This is often lost when trying to pigeon hole a real situation into a single well-know pattern or single idea.
Re: Ideas That Changed My Life
#8We would all benefit from remembering this one > 23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Incremental approaches are limited. A basic example of this is scaling. A chemical process worked out in a lab cannot be incrementally scaled for effective production with bigger test tubes. The entire production process must be designed again from scratch.
Incremental approaches to designing a control system with many if statements will never evolve into a PID controller. Nor will a PID controller be evolved into being able to handle non-linearities.
Scrum may be effective as an organisational process at a team level, but will fail utterly if it is applied to the entire organisation.
Incremental approaches optimise, but that’s all they can do.
Re: Ideas That Changed My Life
#9We would all benefit from remembering this one > 23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
I have a hard time with this.
I see the obvious examples of complex systems failing, but we also have so many other complex systems that sure have their shares of issues, but I am not sure we can mark as failed.
For instance government constitutions are arguably complex, and formed from scratch.
Or to stay in the tech sphere and look at the problem from the other end, is it possible to build anything that hasn't effectively evolved from something more simple ? If tomorrow I'd want to build a whole new rocket from scratch, I'll need to build the parts piece by piece, and test them before assembly.
Do we consider these tests to be simpler systems that are proved to work, thus if my rocket design happens to work, it evolved from simpler systems that got combined ? Does my design come from so many other designs I've seen and learn, and so is an evolution of these past designs ? etc.
My core question would be, does that law have any practical impact in our field ?
Re: Ideas That Changed My Life
#10It's funny that both Overton Window and Horseshoe Theory are both listed. They tend to contradict each other.